The present relates to bicycles and, more specifically, to bicycles that can be collapsed for storage purposes.
In today's urban settings, fewer and fewer areas are accessible for one to ride a bicycle, especially in a recreational sense. Consequently, cyclists are more frequently transporting bicycles to distant areas where they may be able to ride their bikes. To accommodate such trips, bicycle makers have developed bikes that can be reduced in size for easier transportation. Common ways of reducing sizes have been to have removable front tires on the bicycles and to have frame designs that allow the front and rear tires to be folded inwardly with respect to the frame. Examples of such folding or collapsing bikes may be seen in Bogen, U.S. Pat. No. 5,125,678 and Hellestam et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,895,386. While these bicycles have somewhat reduced the space required for storing a bicycle during transport, they still take up greater amounts of space than desired.
Other bicycle designs have been designed so that the bicycle could be broken down into several pieces or sections. Examples of such bicycles are shown in Geisel, U.S. Pat. No. 3,876,231, Underwood, U.S. Pat. No. 4,441,729, and Chao, U.S. Pat. No. 6,929,277. While these bicycles may be broken down into several sections, they are not the easiest to reassemble, and have several small parts that must be organized when storing the bicycle. Such arrangements could be difficult to assemble in a rough terrain, such as a park or other wildlife area. Likewise, these bikes cannot be assembled in a short period of time, such as a few minutes. Furthermore, such designs do not take into account bicycles that have multiple gears, such as ten or fifteen speed bicycles.
Thus, it is desirous to design a sectional bike of any gear arrangement that could be easily disassembled and reassembled and transported.